Help wanted: US teens need science and engineering mentors

A recent survey found that US teens are interested in careers in science, …

It has become somewhat common to read stories or see surveys about the fact that the United States' ranking in scientific and mathematical competency is lower than we would like it to be, or about how the nation's research output is declining. But what is less often discussed are the underlying causes of these trends, and what may be done to address them. One simple solution is to throw more money at the problem, but whether this would result in any improvement proportional to the money spent has yet to be determined. The underlying assumption behind the money-throwing approach is that if kids learn more science and math, things would trickle down through time. When they grow up, they would become part of a more competent, scientifically literate populace that would have more scientists and engineers. The more people doing innovative research, the better for the economy, our country, and the world at large.

A new survey suggests that there may be a much simpler alternative to simply throwing money at the problem. Instead of—or in addition to—just upping funding, the survey discovered that encouraging working scientists and engineers to go out and meet with young people can result in a positive change.

The survey, conducted by the Lemelson-MIT Program, revealed that teens in America have an interest in science, engineering, and mathematics, but a lack of understanding about career paths in these fields is holding them back. The survey also suggests that this lack of knowledge could be easily fixed if those of us who currently enjoy a career in such fields would step up and get out. In fact, almost two-thirds of teen respondents to the survey said that the lack of a mentor would discourage them from entering a science or engineering career.

The interest is there

The 2009 Lemelson-MIT Innovation Index (LMII) found that "an overwhelming majority of teenagers surveyed expressed interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics with 'curiosity about the way things work' as the driving factor for their interest." Of course, "overwhelming" is a useless PR word and has little scientific value, so let's put a number behind it: a full 85 percent of the teens surveyed showed interest in STEM fields. In addition to merely showing interest, 80 percent of those surveyed felt that their schools had sufficiently prepared them—or was in the process of preparing them—for such a career choice.

What is it about these fields that capture the interest of the young? While these careers pay well, by and large, they won't make someone immeasurably rich. (You will rarely, if ever, see scientists or engineers rollin' in a Bently Continental GT Coupe or Aston Martin DB9 while sipping Cristal.) More than half of the respondents reported altruistic reasons for their interest in STEM; 30 percent wanted to help the environment, while another 26 percent wanted to improve society. Less than one-fifth of the respondents cited money or fame as a motivating factor.

The LMII also tried to get a sense of how teens view people in these careers. As an engineer, I could personally be described by the adjective that would first come to the mind of many when they think of the typical engineer: nerdy. Indeed, when I was in graduate school, my wife taught pre-school; she once told me about how she and her co-teacher asked the kids what a scientist looks like. The response from the pre-schoolers was along the lines of "someone who wears glasses and is kind of dorky." But it seems that with a little more perspective on the world, teens have a different view of those in STEM fields. Only five percent of respondents selected "nerdy" as the best-fitting description of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. The majority (55 percent) described them as "intelligent," with 25 percent of the other respondents choosing "successful" as the best descriptor.

So with all the positive attitudes, why aren't these young, interested parties flooding the engineering and science halls of academia across the country? The LMII found that nearly two-thirds (59 percent) of the interested respondents—despite feeling prepared—felt discouraged from pursuing a STEM field career because they don't know anyone who works in the field, or they don't know what these people do. Clearly, young people are interested in STEM careers, but they want to hear from some sort of mentor.

All it takes is you

Students deciding on a path of study can read all the college brochures and talk to professors all day long, but this won't really give them an idea of what truly happens in various fields. It might give some insight into the academic side of STEM, but it won't give them access to the real-world, hands-on experience that those of us working in these fields go through every day. The real solution is for people in STEM fields to make themselves available to talk with interested young people.

Meeting a person who works in a given field is not terribly difficult—any local community college has someone in any number of STEM fields on staff—but actually knowing what kind of work is done in a given area of study is a bit more of an overwhelming task. Speaking as a chemical engineer, I can honestly say that most people have no clue what a chemical engineer does, and they can't give a concise description of what the field even is. (The lack of knowledge of what goes on in STEM fields, engineering in particular, is something I have covered in the past.)

At last year's AAAS meeting I attended a lecture series about marketing engineering where various people spoke about different initiatives and efforts that would allow engineering—specifically the four engineering societies (Chemical, Civil, Mechanical, and Electrical)—to educate the public about what engineers do. To overcome this dearth of knowledge, the group produced the slogan "Engineers make a world of difference." Whether that slogan alone will incite people to flock to engineering careers is open to debate, but the entire premise behind the drive highlights the fact that, for the most part, what people in STEM fields do is not always clear to outsiders.

Many of us in STEM fields often don't know what's involved in bringing science to young people, so to help out in this regard I have been in contact with a variety of programs that do science outreach with a focus on various fields. At the end of this article, I'll list contact information for each of the groups discussed, so that if one of them seems up your alley, you can let them know you want to help out. It should come as no surprise that we at Nobel Intent are big supporters of outreach programs, and many of us have participated in them personally throughout the years. I first did this formally while an undergraduate at the University of Delaware.

"but a lack of understanding about career paths in these fields is holding them back"

And they understand what an English Major or Comparative Literature Major does? One of the reasons I am in engineering is because it is so much clearer what to do with the degree than a humanities or even a science degree. And it probably takes more an interest in how things work to motivate them to put up with the workload that comes with the degree. In my engineering college, there are about 4700 incoming freshmen and about 1100 graduates every year. Many people just aren't prepared for the way of thinking or the work ethic involved.

"The real solution is for people in STEM fields to make themselves available to talk with interested young people."

I can't imagine any liability in matching teenagers, especially insecure nerds both male and female, with the mentally well-adjusted professionals who occupy STEM fields. Their interest in young people can only be beneficial, one might say.

"Here, awkward loner laden with woman-issues, take my children please...."

Great topic. The problem is daunting. We study this from the perspective of being a Computer Science department at a public university in Alabama. Alabama has over 400 high schools. At last count, 7 of them teach anything that could be called computer science. As a result, computer science (and engineering, as well) are at a huge disadvantage in recruiting students when they get to college campuses relative to biology, chemistry and physics, which are all areas that students have experienced in high school.

What we try to do to combat this trend is to get more computer science into high schools through a variety of methods. Ideally, we would like for more high schools to teach computer science, but we find that most of them don't have qualified teachers. We run workshops to train high school teachers, but that's a big time commitment, and high school teachers are already overloaded, so participation has historically been limited. We have even offered to use our own PhD students to run computer science courses in area high schools, but that requires a willing high school, which surprisingly is often hard to find, and the couple of occasions in which we have been able to do this, we have bootstrapped a computer science curriculum at the school only to have it fade out a couple of years after handing it over to their local teachers.

So we try other things which go directly to the students themselves. We sponsor the Alabama High School Programming Contest every year, and that attracts 40 or so of the brightest high school programmers (many self-taught). We mentor students 1-on-1 for their science fair projects. We run many weeks of summer camps each summer on various computer science topics, which always sell out. We run an Alice Film Festival (Alice is a tool aimed at getting middle and high schoolers interested in programming by having them create short animated movies in a 3D world) and that brings in upwards of 100 film submissions. We give department tours to high school student groups from all over the state. So, the interest is out there, but it is not being fostered by high school curriculums.

After many years of these coordinated research efforts, we are starting to see some payoff (some of these students are now our undergrads) but we are a small department and can only do so much. What we really need are for the state's high schools to realize the value of computer science and start offering real computer science classes (not only are almost none doing so, but many are actively causing harm by teaching computer fluency such as MS Office and mistakenly calling that computer science, giving students the wrong impression about what computer science means.) We are happy to train the trainers, but the interest from their side seems limited at the moment, so we'll likely continue to try to reach the students directly and hope to win over students one at a time. It's an expensive way to recruit, but right now it seems to be the only strategy making any headway.

This semester I am mentoring a high school freshman who is doing some impressive research on the performance impacts of virtualization of various components of a LAMP software stack. He won 2nd place at his science fair and is going onto regionals. It's among the most rewarding activities I'm doing at work at the moment. :-) I hope he stays with it and that he'll be our undergrad in four years, but really, if he goes into a computer science program at any college, I'd consider that a huge success.

Originally posted by NuclearError:And they understand what an English Major or Comparative Literature Major does? One of the reasons I am in engineering is because it is so much clearer what to do with the degree than a humanities or even a science degree.

I didn't know the difference between chemistry and chemical engineering until halfway through college.

More importantly, it's vital to see these fields early on so that you DON'T go into them if you hate them. There are a tragic number of dropouts who never belonged from day 1, but tried forcing themselves through difficult programs hoping that things would get better.

I even met two senior year dropouts from pharmacy school. They were only months away from $70K starting salary, and they had to quit because the work was depressing to them. Both transferred into biology, meaning another 2.5 years of school.

After getting in touch with one of them for this article, I have been invited to come back to my high school to help judge their science fair. Outreach is that easy!

I just judged my middle school's science fair two weeks ago.

I volunteer with the Future City Competition to try and get kids in middle school involved in engineering. Its less math/science and more conceptual at this point - trying to get the kids to understand what the problems are and how to solve them. The national competition is this week (this week is also National Engineers Week, so the study came out at an opportune time).

And yea, I'm the loner with woman-issues too, they just put me in the back to add up the scores on the day of the competition on my laptop, and I run the website. You can still help even if you're awkward. You'd be surprised to find that a lot of civil and mechanical engineering groups need technical volunteers like web developers (ever look at some of these groups websites? Hello 1998!!).

The problem here is positively drippingly obvious to any practitioner in science or engineering. Typically you need an advanced degree and some hard won experience in those fields to really have a grasp of the subject. Whereas, to teach high school, you just need a BA and vanishingly small amounts of practical training. There are certainly many exceptions, but to a large degree most science teachers are not very good scientists or engineers. Furthermore, to help discourage practical experience, states load on time-soaking requirements like education classes, which simultaneously keep science teachers out of the lab and keep lab practitioners out of the classroom. It is little wonder why students don't get turned on to science and engineering until college when they have the opportunity to interact with people doing work in the field.

We could probably fix this by encouraging high school students to do summer internships at local companies, rather than leaving them to stock grocery store shelves. I'm sure this would be much more prevalent, except for the general uselessness of folks without even a high school degree. There's nothing in it for the companies, except expense and lost productivity, as experienced people devote time to training younguns who won't stick around for more than a few months. It would no doubt take some serious tax credits to make it worth their while. We may cynically suggest that working the graveyard shift at Safeway would teach the younguns' a few life lessons. (I believe this is society's attitude in general.) However, I think most students aspire to more than that. It would be nice to give them a sense of where they are headed.

quote:

More importantly, it's vital to see these fields early on so that you DON'T go into them if you hate them. There are a tragic number of dropouts who never belonged from day 1, but tried forcing themselves through difficult programs hoping that things would get better.

Heh. I did a Ph.D. and a postdoc and 1 year in the medicinal chemistry industry developing new pharmaceuticals, and never did like lab work. After a while, I was forced to come to terms with this problem, and switched to my hobby for employment. My hobby isn't going to save the world, but it makes me happy and pays better than Ph.D. chemist did.

It's important to do what you love. If you love your work, you'll do a great job and the rewards will follow.

What a service this article is! I can speak from experience that the classroom population is an interested and captivated audience that will eagerly respond to guest speakers, especially if they are going to blow something up or wow them with a show and tell.

There are so many ideas: holography (kits) for older kids, the ever bewildering 200-in-1 electronic circuit kits for anybody (get them used to breadboards), Robotics, and the ever stimulating polarized sheets of paper paradox..now you see it, now you don't.

Mixing starches to get the beaker from purple to clear is always fascinating and water hydrolysis is very topical and significant.

I remember reading that a young boy won a science project with his "lego house" specifically the lego-stepped roof, when painted black on the rising surface, captured more solar energy than any other roof design.

ASQ/Harris recently performed a survey to get to the cause of the engineer shortage. We actually found that parents don't encourage their kids towards those fields. In fact, more of our target demographic were encouraged to be actresses than engineers. Press Release

We developed a webinar with engineers from Sprint and the San Francisco Suspension Bridge Project to talk about the cool things you can do as an engineer. Totally self-promotional, I know, but maybe worth checking out Webinar

I never took up anything remotely close to engineering because there was nobody around me who could introduce me to it.

My school teachers were at best lazy and at worst completely incompetent when it came to providing any hooks of interest, and seemed to do their utmost to make anything associated with maths, science or engineering to be as dull as possible.

When I was four I used to say I wanted to be an astrophysicist according to my mother. School quickly put that career path out of my mind, sadly.

Excellent subject, one ripe for discussion. I've got two related questions that I've struggled to answer, and would like to pose here.

Much of the recruiting for STEM subjects seems to occur at the high school level. However, this approach neglects the students that never bothered with advanced math or physics classes. For this reason, it's been my impression that the younger you can get a child interested in math and science, the better. While outreach to high schools provides vital information about future career paths, how can it best be balanced with driving science education at a younger level? Given one choice, which area needs more attention?

There are resources out there; particularly if you are in a position to help make this possible for someone. I would like to refer you to (and I have no direct influence or control of) the AIMS (Acedemic Investment in Math and Science) program at BGSU in Ohio. It's goal is to increase the number of women and minorities in the STEM fields and precedes normal enrollment with a summer program to give the incoming students a broad look at a number of STEM fields with hands-on experience, in-depth advisory help, and team experience. There are intern/summer opportunities to give real world work experience. If I may be allowed....For additional information contact: T. Carter Gilmer, Ph.D.Director of AIMSBowling Green State UniversityBowling Green , Ohio 43403cgilmer@bgsu.edu(419) 372-0471 / (419) 372-3342 Fax

There is a newer program acronymed COSMOS designed for STEM teachers in the middle and high school range and another program (which I sadly can't remember right now...similar to AIMS).

I started volunteering for a local SITHOK program just over a year ago in November 2007. We have a science center full of hands on demonstrations as well as teacher/classroom support and equipment that is loaned out for students to do projects. My own involvement is to show kids how things work every fourth and fifth Saturday morning each month. Most of the kids I see range from seven years to early teen in age. Its fun and rewarding most of the time. Both kids and parents get such a kick out of learning how something works. I still work as a chemist but other volunteers show whole classrooms of kids around the facility during weekday hours. We get repeat visits from people all over the area that want their kids to see this stuff. Science in the hands of Kids

We have a few fantastic programs at the University of Saskatchewan (up here in Canada) to reach out to kids, and the community at large. These include Discover Engineering, a summer program aimed at piquing interest in grade 8 girls. We also have Spectrum, a triennial, student run, 'science-fair' style event put on by Engineering students to display engineering to the public. We also have a program directed at high school students called E^3 (Encouraging Enrolment in Engineering). All of these things are fantastic but this is done by Engineering [u]students[/u]. If my experience is representative of the school at all, then many students aren't even really sure what is all involved in an Engineering job (I'm currently on my internship getting a Reality Check), and the programs would be well complemented by support from professionals!

At risk of sounding cynical, perhaps its as simple as the fact that there is no TV show glamorizing STEM careers.

Every TV season, we are inundated with a new wave of legal and medical dramas, and it seems that kids' stated career aspirations, or at least what they consider to be good careers, correlates with these shows' content. The only "cool" engineer in my recent memory is the Michael Scofield character from Prison Break. However, his story is mostly interesting because he has to break out of prison all of the time, not due to his differential equation kung-fu.

Perhaps one day, a network will pilot a new STEM-themed show? They could even let Jerry Bruckheimer direct it. Then again...

My own interest in science, engineering and math(I am a computer scientist, the awkward stepchild of all three), was sparked by shows like Mr. Wizard, but it wasn't really ignited until I attended a "science summer camp" in middle school, sponsored by the NSF. They took a bunch of 11 and 12 year olds from various extremely small rural Texas schools to a college for a summer, and kindly PhDs showed us some fundamentals of their fields in ways interesting to pre-teens (everything from collecting water samples, to creating polymers, to making holograms, to using a S/T electron microscope, and more). That program is no longer there, and I really really wish it was. THAT is what made me want to go into a STEM field of some sort. So yes, outreach is extremely important, imo.

On another note: I've wanted to get involved with teaching or tutoring at the middle-high school level, but unfortunately I found my inquiries into education certificate programs to be pretty discouraging.

As a bona-fide nerd growing up (son of a physics professor ), I didn't see a whole lot of value in shows like Mr. Wizard or Bill Nye the Science Guy - however, having done a little STEM outreach during and after college, I'm much more open to those shows now, since I think anything that can get the kids asking questions "why" is good.

I've been trying to do a little STEM outreach at a local high school here in the Bay Area (CA), and it's been a rather interesting experience, relative to what teachers are looking for - it's very much the close, personal involvement, and they don't have as much interest in the STEM packages a lot of organizations/corporations have been floating. Principally, there's a major disconnect between what the orgs think works and what the teachers find practical. A rather prominent example was in timing - a typical HS class is around 45 minutes, throw in ten minutes for the class to settle in, set up, another ten minutes for takedown and teacher summary, and there's only about 20-25 minutes to actually get something done, which makes any hands-on activities extremely difficult (HSes on block scheduling are a bit easier to deal with in this regard). STE classes typically have decent budgets, as there's a fair amount of material that is consumed over the course of the year (not math classes, so much ), so the teacher's I've talked with are more than willing to pay for something, they just want a program that will work with their schedules and individual quirks. Unfortunately, industry's view seems to be that the teachers are looking more for something free (or low-cost) and would be willing to radically change their class structure to accommodate a STEM package.

Wow, I can't believe this article and comments have no mention of programs like FIRST and BotBall. You want a hands on event that get kids together real engineers? That is the express goals of those programs/events.

In those kinds of programs you don't just chat with kids about engineering, you actually *do* engineering with them. I am in a university robotics club and many of the people will see have participated in those programs. In fact BotBall is what inspired me to pursue my current obsession with robotics.

I spoke with Peter Blain, the outreach correspondent for the hospital. Peter told me that the program they run is more academically focused rather than career-focused. In the hospital's hometown of Springfield, MA, few of the students in public education have ever had any exposure to the lab portion of a lab science

I live in Springfield as a self-employed engineer who has participated in a few outreach programs in western and eastern MA, and I've never heard of this program.

Seems like one first step is to better publicize some of the outreach opportunities that are out there.

I'm surprised nobody has brought up what to me is blindingly obvious: the problem is not in the classroom, it's in the boardroom. Careers in science and engineering are incredibly difficult, require great personal sacrifice and innate abilities. Compare the kind of money you can make in science or engineering to that of law, management, etc. and it's no wonder we graduate tons of MBAs and lawyers.

You want more engineers? Stop trying to scrape up cheap ones from other countries, and instead make sure they get rewards commensurate with the difficulty of the job - and you'll have a lot more kids take interest. It's a lot more attractive to think you can play baseball when baseball players are celebrities, than it is to think you can go work in a cube following abstruse CMMI processes and feeling like a cog after investing years more and 10s of K more to acquire the necessary expertise.

I'm a high school student who is currently in a school for technology and engineering as my focus. I think having a mentor engineer would really help me with my choice in career path. I know I want to be in engineering or computer science, but not which specific discipline. I know from personal experience that I didn't start to enjoy math until I had a teacher that taught me how math was used in the real world. Suddenly, I saw how almost everything we do in our modern life is touched by mathematics. I don't believe in innate ability, and I know that the road to an engineering degree is an arduous one, but at this point I'm willing to do it. I do believe that we Americans are very innovative and passionate as engineers, but in my personal experience, my schooling hasn't reflected how I could actually use mathematics in everyday life. Most people don't know that the sine function they learn about in pre-calculus and scorned over when they have a test is actually the same thing that allows them to listen to their Ipod. My view is that the missing piece is the simple fact that we as high schoolers are told we need to learn _____, but never why. At the same time, I'm not sure where this is coming from, I applied to the largest engineering university in my state, and it's brutal competition (most high school GPAs around 4.75 and SATs around 600-650). There are kids willing to learn, and they are applying to go to schools to become engineers and scientists. So, from my limited view, I'm not sure I see where the drop in interest exists.

Originally posted by Gorbag:I'm surprised nobody has brought up what to me is blindingly obvious: the problem is not in the classroom, it's in the boardroom. Careers in science and engineering are incredibly difficult, require great personal sacrifice and innate abilities. Compare the kind of money you can make in science or engineering to that of law, management, etc. and it's no wonder we graduate tons of MBAs and lawyers.

You want more engineers? Stop trying to scrape up cheap ones from other countries, and instead make sure they get rewards commensurate with the difficulty of the job - and you'll have a lot more kids take interest. It's a lot more attractive to think you can play baseball when baseball players are celebrities, than it is to think you can go work in a cube following abstruse CMMI processes and feeling like a cog after investing years more and 10s of K more to acquire the necessary expertise.

The change that is needed isn't educational, it's societal.

++

Also, read the articles--especially the editorial--from this week's Nature linked above by ads2. Here's a quotation:

quote:

There is no doubt that competition can breed excellence, and that agencies should be rigorously selective in their research portfolios. But beyond a certain point, the hyper-competition for grants, publication and tenure hurts everyone — the individuals involved, the country and science itself. The process ceases to select for only the very best young scientists, and instead starts to drive many of the smartest students out of research entirely. They realize that the risks outweigh the benefits in science and choose alternative careers. Witness the steady migration of top undergraduates to business and other professions in the past decade, and the drop in the number of doctorates in science and engineering earned by US students since it peaked in the mid-1990s.

It sounds like a fair amount of the posters here went to good schools where the teachers seemed to care. And a few posters seem to be having/had the experience I did. Which was of a school filled with very bright professors that had little in the way of educational ability. Looking back on it most of my professors knew all the things they were teaching us. They knew it so completely (like an adult knowing 2+2) they was very difficult for them to relay that knowledge to us. To be able to explain it in a way we could understand. But that's just one of the issues I have.

At this point in time the other is, jobs? I hear about them, but never see one for an entry level engineering position. Let me give you a better perspective: I started college in 97, where the mantra was get your degree and you'll have a $50k a year job no problem. Come 2001 when I graduate, the tech bubble has exploded, and most of the tech market has crashed, well good luck to you. Fast forward to the last year, same type issues. I'm not saying there aren't great entry level engineers fresh out of college, or like me who'd just like a chance. It's more that there are plenty of seasoned people looking for jobs too. Not that it's their fault, but with the economy going to pot I'd be hard pressed to tell someone going to college to go towards engineering. I did it because I had a false reality of college, but that's another story. In the end I have a degree in EE, have I used it...I guess you can say so, but not in an actual engineering capacity.

(To give you an exact visual of this: sophomore year, some intro to engineering class (maybe engineering ethics, don't exactly remember). The first day the professor asks several question and wants a answer by a show of hands:1. How many people are in engineering because of the money? 75% raise their hand.2. How many people are in engineering because they like the material? 10% raise their hand.3. How many people have had some previous exposure to their type of material? 20% raise their hand.See the problem with that? I do. And I answered #2 and 3.)

I love the idea of getting kids interested in things like this. I wish I had someone that could have explained the real differences between NPN and PNP, and why I kept frying leds on my 200-in-1 kit... But at the same time, I think a high schooler is hard pressed to know what they want to do with the rest of their life. A few do, many don't. If I could do it over, I wouldn't have a degree in engineering. Maybe chemistry, I found that to be fairly easy (even thought I didn't find it to be a motivating field). I think there should be more emphasis in high school to develop what a person is good at and let them explorer fields from those areas. It would at least help them before they got to the excitingly tedious college work.

Originally posted by Gorbag:I'm surprised nobody has brought up what to me is blindingly obvious: the problem is not in the classroom, it's in the boardroom. Careers in science and engineering are incredibly difficult, require great personal sacrifice and innate abilities. Compare the kind of money you can make in science or engineering to that of law, management, etc. and it's no wonder we graduate tons of MBAs and lawyers.

You want more engineers? Stop trying to scrape up cheap ones from other countries, and instead make sure they get rewards commensurate with the difficulty of the job - and you'll have a lot more kids take interest. It's a lot more attractive to think you can play baseball when baseball players are celebrities, than it is to think you can go work in a cube following abstruse CMMI processes and feeling like a cog after investing years more and 10s of K more to acquire the necessary expertise.

The change that is needed isn't educational, it's societal.

Gorbag, I wholly agree.

Still, I keep coming back to this basic public knowledge thing with our society: a majority of our population is mind-numbingly uneducated about the most important facet of biology. The thought makes me sick.

Can we change the jobs without changing society's understanding of them? We need both, I think.

Matt Ford / Matt is a contributing writer at Ars Technica, focusing on physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. When he's not writing, he works on realtime models of large-scale engineering systems.